Complexity in Prague

I have arrived in Prague for the Conference on Computational Complexity, my favorite conference as you might guess from the name of the weblog. STOC and FOCS get a broader crowd but many of my fellow researchers from the past two decades come to this conference most years and I enjoy talking with them, catching up with research and with life. Just last night I had dinner with Lisa Hellerstein (a COLT person crashing our conference) and Manindra Agrawal, fresh from receiving his Gödel Prize last week at ICALP in Venice.

Blogging will likely be light this week as the conference keeps me busy and I once again have limited Internet access.

One of the students in Chicago had planned to go yesterday to Israel to work for a month with Eldar Fischer at the Technion in Haifa. He postponed his trip, no so much because of the danger, but because getting to Haifa has become very difficult and the University has temporarily closed. The Technion, aka The Israel Institute of Technology, has by far the largest collection of theoretical computer scientists at any single university. Haifa University also has a nice theory group. We sincerely hope the situation resolves itself quickly and they can return to a sense of normalcy, as normal as one gets in that region.